Telecommunication networks are generally designed to meet the required demand for service with minimal blocking. In telecommunication engineering terms like "busy hour" and "low traffic hours" are well known concepts.
Historically, telecommunication networks have been designed to accommodate predetermined blocking percentages, for example 1% during the busy hour. Those skilled in the art will appreciate that telecommunication networks are faced with a certain amount of over-capacity of the telecommunication network during off-peak times.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,488,655 discloses a method and system for flatten out the busy hour demand through the use of variable price incentives. In essence, there is disclosed a method and a system for determining a variable customer usage rate or tariff dependent on the number of available communication links. The traffic condition of the network is measured on a substantially continuous real-time bases. In general, the customers usage rate is more or less inversely proportional to the number of available communication links.
Although this prior art method and system may have an effect in flattening out the busy hour bulges of a typical working day, a more efficient use of the over-capacity of the network during low traffic hours, i.e. the traffic intensity in the network is small compared to its capacity, such as in the early morning hours or during evening and night time can not be achieved therewith.